


will you burn by the things i've said

by bittereternity



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Developing Relationship, F/M, Swearing, pre-avengers, subtle descriptions of violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-30
Updated: 2013-11-30
Packaged: 2018-01-03 00:01:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1063260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bittereternity/pseuds/bittereternity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Love is for children but sometimes he falls asleep with his head on her shoulder and her fingers itch at the closeness . Love is for children but sometimes he texts her in the middle of the night and she always replies back, smiling to herself in the darkness. Love is for children but sometimes she <i>wants</i>. </p><p>Clint and Natasha, not quite in reverse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	will you burn by the things i've said

**Author's Note:**

> this is almost completely inspired by [this fanmix](http://jeremyandscarlett.tumblr.com/post/66017269904/break-you-a-clint-natasha-fanmix-01-break-you). it's fantastic, and you should all go listen to it!

*

In the outskirts of Moscow, he has an arrow pointed at her heart.

She can think of forty-three ways to kill him right on the spot, pictures the way his neck would sit wrongly on his torso once she’s snapped, twisted it all the way round.  But it won’t matter, she knows that S.H.I.E.L.D. has them surrounded; she has knives and guns and heels high enough to pierce a man to death, but there must be at least fifty of them against her, and she’s always been good at math.

She looks at Hawkeye – Agent Barton, she corrects herself – with a smile on her face. He’s not the only one who’s done his homework, after all.

“Should I be flattered?” she asks him, “that S.H.I.E.L.D. has to send their best and brightest to kill me?”

He doesn’t move but she can see his jaw shift in the dim light. It’s the closest he will come to smiling at her. “Should _I_ be flattered?” he asks instead.

She clasps her hands together, a knife concealed between her fingers. “Tell me, _Clint_ ,” she tastes his name on her lips, drawing out the letters on her teeth, “does this help you sleep at night? Killing people and telling yourself that you’re doing it for the _good_ guys?”

Barton tilts his head without changing his stance. The way he looks at her, on someone else she would’ve called it pity. “We’re assassins, Miss Romanov. Sleep was not made for us.”

She looks at him again, then, at the lines around his eyes, the scars on his wrists, the shape of his lips. “What are you waiting for?”

There’s no mistaking the pity in his voice this time. “So eager to die, Miss Romanov? Have you finally realized that you’ve lost this round or are you simply waiting for someone to kill you, put you out of this _misery_?”

She clenches her teeth. “I don’t _want_ to die,” she tells him. It feels like giving something away.

He keeps looking at her, head tilting slightly to the left. It’s unnerving, the way he thinks he can pin her down with his gaze. “No, I guess not,” he finally allows, and something loosens in her chest. “You don’t want to die. But you don’t want to live very much either, do you?”

She bites her lip so hard she can taste the blood on her teeth. “Fuck you,” she tells him.

He laughs, a sound short and alarming in the silence between them. A moment later, he releases the grip on his arrow and raises his hand, and she tenses, fights the urge to close her eyes before it darts towards her. Instead, he lowers his arrow and raises a hand to his ear, throwing his earpiece off and stamping it with his foot, just once.

He lays down his bow and takes a step towards her. “With pleasure,” he says.

*

When he kisses her, his lips are chapped and rough and her lips tingle against his. His fingers are rough and callused and they grip her too tightly, in too many places all at once. His kisses are sharp edges that prick holes into her and she fights off the urge to wince.

He grips her arms and she sees the chance, twists in his grip and slams him against the wall, watching as his eyes flutter shut into her touch. Her nails etch his face, scratching lightly at the corners of his stubble, catching in the short, coarse hair that feels like he’s forgotten to shave in the morning. She folds her fingers in his hair and _pulls_ and he slides down a little in response, arches his back against the wall. Natasha takes his face in her hands and looks closer, watches as his pupils dilate just a fraction, his lips part open just the tiniest bit, looks for the tiniest bob of his Adam’s apple. She puts a hand to this throat and feels his pulse: quick, erratic, desperate.

“That desperate for one last fuck?” she asks with a hand right over his thyroid and it would be so easy to just twist and push against it, leave him slumping against the floor.

He breathes heavily, his words harsh gasps and blurred exhales. “You won’t kill me,” he gasps, and she hates how his voice doesn’t shake.

“I can make your heart stop in three, two, one,” she offers.

Barton laughs, wide-eyed and out of breath. “If you wanted to kill me, you would’ve done it already.” His fingers wrap around her chin as he tilts her face up, up and close enough for her to look right at him, into his eyes made of a highly uninteresting shade of brown. “Look at you,” he murmurs into the shadows of her cheekbones, “trying so hard to _understand_.”

She twists away and wraps a leg around his hips, pulls him closer. He’s hard against her stomach, firm and unapologetic and she suppresses a smile. This is how they all break, their come on her hands and their secrets on her tongue. “Was this your plan all along? Fuck me into understanding?”

He rests his elbows on her shoulders, smoothens her hair with his palms, wide and gaping, coarse against her face. “Can you trust me?” he asks her.

She cocks her head, one hand on his belt. “Would you have trusted me if our positions were reversed?”

Barton’s hand stills in her hair, looks at her with a slight frown between his eyes. He looks at her like he knows to how to light her on fire, like he can picture all the ways he can turn her into ashes. She grits her teeth and fights back the urge to fidget, to look away.

“No,” he finally says. “But I would’ve come anyway.”

“How can you be sure?”

He kisses her first, moving his thumb over the corner of her mouth. “Because you still don’t understand.”

She digs her heel further in between his thighs, relishing in the way he can’t quite help eliciting a surprised moan. “Did you really think you could _save_ me?”

Barton closes his eyes as she presses further in, a flicker of pain crossing his features only for a second. A moment later, he wrenches his hand from under her and slaps her on the cheek, hard and fast, in a way that knocks the breath out of her chest, sends her reeling back long enough for him to push her off. Her breath falls on his shoulder, harsh and ragged as he twists her hands beneath her and keeps them in place with a cable tie. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” he whispers in her hair, grabbing her by her elbows and pushing her towards the exit.

*

“You can’t save me, so you should just stop trying,” she tells him again on their flight back, the both of them alone at the back as a man in the suit – Agent Coulson, he’d introduced himself at the extraction point – paces, snapping one-word answers into his phone.

He looks at her, and his hair is half-mussed and his smile is softer, sadder. She wonders how he can relax, slump his shoulders next to her. Wonders why she hasn’t killed him yet.

 _Because you still don’t understand_ , his voice echoes in her head, over and over, and she hates herself for unwittingly giving away pieces of herself she’d frozen long back. “Don’t worry,” he says, and his fingers twist in his lap. “I couldn’t even save myself.”

*

The truth is, Clint loves Natasha first.

She can pinpoint the exact moment when he falls in love, pressed up against her in Moscow, eyes creased at the sides and head tilted, asking her to trust him. She can pinpoint the exact moment he realizes it too, eyes widening as she declines, smiling like he’s expected that answer all along.

The truth is, Clint loves Natasha first but he loves her at the corners like excess ink from words spilled over, loves her in the quiet maze of the air ducts where no one can find him, loves her in the sound of the first strings of music before the song begins. He doesn’t look at her lips when he talks to her, his eyes don’t seek hers out in any form. He trains her and they spar together, and she may be nimble, quick on her feet but he can throw a fiercer punch, can suddenly reappear in her field of vision and startle her.

The truth is, Clint loves Natasha first but he loves her enough to stay away.

*

Outside Johannesburg, in one of their first missions together, she goes off-script.

Coulson’s orders in her ear are terse, reminding her to stand down but there’s a hostage situation and three consecutive shots have been fired already, distant sounds of terrified cries floating towards them, piercing the armor of hushed, tense silence. Taking a deep breath, she pockets her weapon and walks forward to the enclosed area, her strides even, confident on the ground. With a bounce in her hair and the first two buttons of her suit undone, she walks in and offers the perpetrators an escape, a way out. Her heart in her mouth and Coulson’s shouts in her air, she feeds them enough information about S.H.I.E.L.D. to convince them that she’s turned, gives up enough information that’s low-risk enough and classified enough to get their attention.

An hour and a half later, the hostages have been evacuated and she turns back, ready to lead the perpetrators out when her exit is blocked with a knife against her throat and an arrow aimed at her heart.

She looks up, sweat glistening on her forehead and shoulders arched away from the steel glinting close, too close on her throat and smiles at Clint, all teeth. “We’ve _got_ to stop meeting like this,” she says.

*

“Would you have killed me,” she asks him later, “if I had really gone rogue?”

“Yes,” his reply is instantaneous, no room for hesitation, no break in his voice.

She falls a little in love, then.

*

Sometimes, in the lull after a mission or during the silence when they breathe in sync after a workout, they trade scars.

Clint has two scars on the underside of his wrist and he shivers when she touches them, eyes wide-open, vulnerable and pliant under her fingers. He comes apart under her, unravels like a string, like the unspoken story hidden in the pages of a worn, well-thumbed novel, like the tear at the edges of a burnt piece of fabric. There are twenty-nine ways in which she can kill him right now and it wouldn’t even hurt; only a slight pinch and his eyes would never close on their own again. The thought sends a tremor down her fingers, right down to the tips of her nails and she hides her hands in the crook of his elbow, tries to swallow. There are twenty nine ways she can kill him right now and thinking of every one of them makes her hand shake.

She opens her eyes again to find Clint’s thumb on her collarbone, tracing a burn mark from a childhood she’s never had. It extends all the way down to her navel, crossing over her left breast, and his fingers are harsh and he holds her too hard but he peels her away, cleanses the corners where memories prick like a needle, heals her under his hands. She look at the pale skin over his elbow and wonders how it would feel to mark his veins in steel, trace the trajectories on his arms under the glint of a knife, memorize them like a map created only for her eyes.

Clint nudges her lightly, his elbow poking at her hip. “What are you thinking?” he murmurs.

She shifts a little and pulls his hand up around her so that it’s draped around her shoulder, her head resting on his arm. “Nothing,” she says as he pulls her closer. “Nothing.”

 “

Love is for children but sometimes he falls asleep with his head on her shoulder and her fingers itch at the closeness to his scalp, itch with the desire to _feel._ Love is for children but sometimes he texts her in the middle of the night, in all caps, and tells her about the trailer of a movie she doesn’t care about and she always replies back, smiling to herself in the darkness. Love is for children but sometimes she _wants_.

*

In Budapest, she slits two throats for him.

They lose communication with each other, stranded in the middle of a city that’s turned into a war-zone. Around her, people drop like dominoes and the sky bleeds with the sound of empty bullet shells. One moment he’s helping her rescue school kids trapped under the rubble of what used to once be a building, and the next, there’s a shower of bullets between them, springing them apart. When she gets back up, readjusting over the smoke coloring her vision, he’s gone and his private line is white noise in her ear.

She takes off in an instant, finally catching sight of him on the other side of the street, pinned to a street corner and swaying on his feet, surrounded by a group of men and the wrong end of multiple guns. She ducks behind a car that crashes off the side of the road, off-balance, and fires once, twice, thrice until she brings them all to their knees.

Clint stares at her, wide-eyed with the mark of a needle on his arm and a terrifying kind of blankness on his face. “What did they do to you?” she can hear herself shouting as she searches him for injuries, “what did they _do_?”

One of the men on the floor groans, and she moves on auto-pilot, pinning the man with her leg and shielding Clint behind her. He gazes up from the road, his hands drenched in red from where she’d shot him in the stomach, and she doesn’t think, plunges her knife across his throat in one swift, sure, perpendicular motion. It comes back red and spills over her hands and she watches the life go out of his eyes before moving on to the next person, one hand gripping Clint’s waist around her back.

*

Back in the van, Coulson looks at her with a raised eyebrow.

“Barton was comprised,” she tells him and tries her best not to sound defensive. Fails. “I had to make a choice in the field, sir.”

Coulson doesn’t bat an eyelash, simply raises a finger at her. “You’re crying,” he points out.

She raises a hand to her cheek, fingers trembling against her skin, and it comes back colorless, comes back wet.

*

“That was so _cool_ ,” Clint tells her in medical with a loopy smile on his face and morphine running through his veins. “That was awesome, Tasha. You did that for _me_?”

She twitches at the effort to stop herself from leaning forward and clasping his hand. There are fifty-eight ways in which she can kill him right now except her hands are lead on her own thighs.  Agents get targeted in the field all the time and yet, and yet he looks up at her through half-lidded eyes and with a pout on his lips and she breaks.

It isn’t the red on her hands that scare her; it’s how utterly ready she is to destroy the world in his name, how willing she is to count fates of other men in his heartbeats. It’s how much saving him feels like absolution.

“For _me_?” he repeats and Natasha sighs. “For you,” she echoes.

*

“You don’t owe me anything, you know,” he tells her after he’s recovered, shoving far too many fries into his mouth. “We’re totally even on the life-saving front.”

She chews her turkey sandwich and thinks of the world blurring away from her mind when she’d thought he was dead, the edges of his fingertips on her skin long after they’re gone.

“On that front,” she agrees.

*

“Barton’s been compromised,” Coulson tells her and she stills.

She hates him, then. Hates that he knows her kryptonite, hates that he’s figured out the magic words that she’ll burn down the world for and emerge victorious, covered with bruises but still intact, always intact. And she fights, _god_ does she fight.

“Let me put you on hold,” she replies.

*

In the aftermath, Clint has nightmares. He’s quiet next to her on nights when there’s too much noise, never screaming or scrambling up in bed or attacking her in a fit of terror. She knows he has nightmares by the way he shifts in his sleep, curls up within himself and digs his nails into his palms in a way that’ll leave marks in the morning. It would almost be easier, she thinks, to watch him scream rather than be lost by himself in the silence, in the corners of his mind that she can’t reach, where everything is ice and fire and blank stares, laced with hatred, directed towards her. 

There’s nothing she can do but stroke his back until he slowly, gradually, finally leans into her. Natasha lies awake and listens to his breathing even out, and on his behalf, she hates the color blue.

There are sixteen ways in which she can kill herself right now, and she stays awake next to one of them, listening to him breathe.

*

She wakes him up one morning with two tickets to Budapest on a flight that leaves in three hours.

“Thought a change of scenery might be nice,” she shrugs in response to his raised eyebrow.

“And Budapest was the best you came up with?” he turns the tickets around in his hand, slight suspicion flickering on his face.

 _Something changed there_ , she wants to tell him but there are no words for _this_ that she’s found.

“We have memories there,” she tells him instead.

Clint blinks the sleep away from his eyes and she struggles not to find it adorable. “Good ones?” he asks.

“Great ones,” she smiles at him, tongue in cheek.

He barks out a short laugh and looks around the bed for his shirt. “Like I said, you and I have _very_ different memories of Budapest.”

She sits down next to him and their shoulders touch. Looking at him, Natasha gives him everything. “Let’s make some more memories,” she says. “Together.”

*

In Moscow, he had an arrow pointed at her heart, her name written all over it.

“Go ahead,” she told him, a smirk forming at the corner of her lips. Red was her hair, and red would be her blood as her life became yet another stain on him, that much she would make sure of.

She took a couple of steps forward and he still didn’t move even though his hands were straight, taut, drawn-out towards her.

“Kill me, Agent Barton,” she said through clenched teeth and it was only basic courtesy, to look into the eyes of the man who was sent to kill her. Her voice was a half-whisper, yet her words were loud in the silence.

Fire blazing in his eyes, he took a step towards her, the arrow inching closer. At point-blank range, he looked at her and it felt like unraveling.

“Natalia,” he said.

*

**Author's Note:**

> i find myself getting overly invested in this pairing of late, so if you have prompts, feel free to direct them towards [my tumblr](http://cllintbartons.tumblr.com)!


End file.
